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So, How Many Fluid Ounces Are in a Gallon of Water?, there are "gifted" students, "average" students, "Title I" students, "learning disabled" students, and so on, in order to justify the different access and opportunities students receive. Assessment and evaluation technology permits schools to categorize, compare, rank, and assign value to students' abilities and achievements in relationship to one another (as well as to students in other schools, states, and countries-past and present). Homogeneous grouping began in earnest early in the 20th century. It matched the prevailing IQ conception of intelligence, behavioral theories of learning, a transmission and training model of teaching, and the factory model of school organization.

It fit with schools' role in maintaining a social and economic order in which those with power and privilege routinely pass on their advantages to their children. Homogeneous grouping embodied a belief that permeated schooling during the 20th century-that we understand most about students when we look at their differences, and the more differences that can be identified, the better our understanding and teaching. Homogeneous grouping provided policymakers and educators a way to "solve" an array of problems attributed to the growing diversity of students. New immigrants needed to learn English and American ways. Factories needed trained workers. Urban youth needed supervision. And schools needed to continue their traditional role of providing high-status knowledge to prepare some students for the professions. Policymakers defined equal educational opportunity as giving all students the chance to prepare for largely predetermined and certainly different adult lives.

 

Concurrently, How Many Fluid Ounces Are in a Gallon of Water?: (1) universal schooling would give all students some access to knowledge; (2) IQ could justify differentiated access to knowledge as a hallmark of democratic fairness. While most current grouping practices don't rely on IQ-at least exclusively-the early dependence upon it set a pattern that continues today. Standardized achievement tests, strikingly similar to IQ tests, play an important role in dividing students into ability groups and qualifying students for compensatory education programs; standardized language proficiency tests determine which class "level" is appropriate for limited English students. In conjunction with other measures, IQ remains central in the identification of gifted and cognitively disabled students.

How Many Fluid Ounces in a Gallon of Water?, compulsory education laws and the necessity of a high school diploma drew more and more students to school-even those previously considered uneducable. States and local school systems developed an array of special programs for students who, in earlier times, simply would not have been in school. By the 1960s, the federal government had turned to special categorical programs as its principal way to guarantee education for all American students.